1. The concept of imagery. Tropes

Art is virtually based on imagery. An arisctic image is a unit of art and it serves to reflect the reality as the author perceives it. The artistic image is an artistic presentation of the general through the individual, of the abstract through the concrete and the sensuous. In verbal art imagery is embodied in words used in a figurative way to attain a higher artistic expressiveness. Words in figurative expressions connote, or acquire additional layers of meaning in a particular context.

So, the verbal image is a pen-picture of a thing, person or idea expressed in a figurative way, i.e. by words used in their contextual meaning.

Images – due to their frequent use – often become recognized symbols.

Linguistic figurativeness or linguistic imagery can be found in various lexical lingual means that are termed either tropes (Ancient Gk. tropos ‘to turn’), or – like in our course – lexical stylistic devices.

A literary trope is the figurative use of a word or a phrase that creates imagery.NB! Imagery can be created by lexical SD’s only.

The rest of stylistic devices (morphological and syntactical, phonetic, graphic) do not create imagery, but serve as intensifiers: they can add some logical, emotive, expressive information to the utterance.

The verbal image is described as a complex phenomenon, a double picture generated by linguistic means, which is based on the co-presence of two thoughts of different things active together:

the direct thought – the tenor (T).

the figurative thought – the vehicle (V).

E.g. She (T) is a bird of passage (V).

The tenor is the subject of thought, while the vehicle is the concept of a thing, person or an abstract notion with which the tenor is compared or identified.

As I.V. Arnold points out, the structure of a verbal image also includes: the ground of comparison (G) — the similar feature of Т and V; the relation (R) between Т and V; the type of identification/comparison or, simply, the type of a trope.

Images may be:

general (macroimages), e.g. ‘War and Peace’

individual (microimages), e.g. that great ocean of deep depression.

I.R. Galperin divides images into three categories:

visual, e.g. It was a feast of colour.

aural (acoustic), e.g. ding-dong

relational, e.g. a man of figures, a man of great dignity.

2. Graphical stylistic means

Graph means are stylistically relevant because they let the reader understand what in oral speech is rendered with the help of prosodic elements: stress, pitch, pauses, the lengthening and multiplying of some sounds. Usually, graphical means render the emotional colouring of speech. They include: - punctuation marks - typographic techniques - graphons.

Punctuation marks alongside their function of dividing sentences into syntactic units and texts into sentences, they also point out elements prominent emotionally like emotional pauses, irony and some others, reflect not only logical but, also, rhythmical-metodical organization of speech. Their aim is - to attract the attention of the reader and to foreground expressive, emotional, evaluative, functional-stylistic and aesthetic information. Several exclamation and interrogation marks used in close succession mean that that the text is emotionally charged. At the same time these marks may deviate from their traditional use of expressing delight, surprise. Accordingly, the interrogation mark at the end of a sentence may indicate a rhetorical question, which, in fact, is a statement. A dash may be used to mark emotional pauses which may indicate such feelings as embarrassment, uncertainty, nervousness. Suspension marks may also be used in similar cases. A full-stop and a comma are often used to indicate detachment, which makes a member of the sentence more accented. The main function of inverted commas is to mark the beginning and the end of a quotation.

Special typographic techniques are used to reflect the emphasis and emotion of live speech. They are:

• Italics (letters slope forwards to the right), look [sound] emphatic,

• Printing in capital letters - the first letter in a word or the whole word. It also serves as a graphical basis for the formation of such stylistic device as autononiasia:

• Spacing out h a s

• Multiplication the absuuurdent creature

• Hyphenation: c-r-e-a-t-u-r-e

• Bold type

The graphon is an associative stylistic device of the phono-graphical level which is realized through the distortion of spelling norms. The changes in spelling supply some additional information about the character's social, regional, and national characteristics, his cultural and educational level, his age and his physical and emotional stale. (“So he ish”)

• the interior graphons (gotta, wonna, gimme, lemme)

• contact graphons (reflecting changes at word junctions when words are blended into one. e.g. o 'town —of town.

Examples of graphons can be found, also in Cockney, in Northern dialect, in American English - Negro pronunciation.